Resources

This volume republishes tracts by Roy arguing against the legitimacy of the practice of self-immolation, related petitions from the 1820s, and articles from newspapers, news magazines, and left journals about the alleged sati of Roop Kanwar in 1987.

Banerjee, Pompa. Burning Women: Widows, Wtiches, and Early Modern European Travelers in India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

An exploration of how European accounts from the 1500s to the 1700s of the ritualized violence involved in the self-immolation of Hindu widows intersected with the burning of witches and criminal wives in Europe during the same centuries.

Hawley, John Stratton, ed. Sati The Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

A collection of essays representing diverse viewpoints from a conference at Columbia University held in 1988 after the alleged sati of Roop Kanwar in 1987. The essays range from theoretical analyses to an intensive dissection of events in Deorala. The bibliography of primary and secondary sources is extensive.

Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

A highly influential analysis of the arguments and eyewitness accounts of British officials, Indian elites, and Christian missionaries about self-immolation that emphasizes how the debates were waged on the bodies of Indian women.

A landmark analysis based on British district records in Bihar and Bengal from 1815 to 1828 that reveals the limited incidence of sati, the preponderance of low-caste widows in most districts who committed self-immolation during this period, and probably the significance of economic motives in determining who committed sati.